Searched the Seas of Gold

The Gold Museum.

The name alone inspired girlish delight in me when my professor mentioned over dinner that it was to be today's activity. Oh, I know the Gold Museum. I know it well. And now I have seen it in person, and it was awesome.

I skipped my run today thanks to the early morning departure and nighttime adventures. I'll make it up tomorrow.

ON TO THE GOLD MUSEUM.
It was spectacular. And they didn't allow any photography. At all. I wanted to cry. All of these beautiful, wondrous things that I got to see and I couldn't chronicle it at all to share with you or to reflect upon later.

But if you know me at all, you know that I don't ever follow any paltry rules like no photography. So here are the few pictures that I was able to sneak. Most of these are from the Mummy Hall.

The Museo Oro Del Peru. That's right. I was there.

A fetal position mummy. He is tiny in real life, and this
was an adult.

I call her the Princess Mummy, though I don't know who
she actually was... either way, this is a female mummy
with incredibly long braided hair, wrapped in a fine cloth
and adorned with a feather headdress. She was important.

This textile was enormous and disturbingly in tact---a burial shroud.

A pair of trepinated skulls. Look closely at the one on the left---his
trepination is closed over with a GOLD PLATE. Yes, skin grew back
over it.

An impressively large quipu.

And that was all I was able to capture in photographs. However, the official website has a few pictures that I'm going to grab for our purposes here, just so you can see a few of the other pieces I saw.

Perhaps the most famous piece in the
Museo, this is a ceremonial knife known
as a "tumi," and it is gold and turquoise,
and about a foot tall.

This picture may be tiny, but the cases in the background
accurately represent what EACH AND EVERY case looked
like in the Museo---CRAMMED with gold.

The Wall of Gold (Muro del Oro).

This place just went on and on for ages. Other highlights included the whole, mummified, feathers-on parrot that the Museo had and the attractions upstairs, which was a military history museum. It housed antique arms and armour from all parts of the world, including a Nazi case (containing a gold "ALLES FUR DEUTSCHLAND" dagger), a Japanese hall (containing several katana, wakizaski and tsuba made of ivory, gold, carved, painted, inlaid with jewels, etcetera...), rooms and rooms full of floor-to-ceiling guns (dueling pistol sets like you wouldn't even believe, a case containing only blunderbusses, a 1918 13mm anti-tank rifle), and an entire section dedicated to equestrian antiques. It was ridiculous. Even if I had been allowed to take pictures, I never would have been able to show them all to you or even begin to take enough.

I will return to the Museo Oro del Peru some day soon.

In other news, I bought a totally cute alpaca sweater in the open market at Parque Kennedy this evening while out with my friend Ani. Pictures of that to follow tomorrow. My roommates are all asleep now and I don't want to wake them with my silly picture-taking!

Mucho amor.
-B